Either Way
by starboarder
Summary: Christine made a choice. So did Erik. Five years after the events at the Opera Populaire, a rare opportunity arises for each to re-examine their decisions and their feelings.


The storm came sooner than expected. Dark clouds that at morning had seemed far off descended with an agility that caught the day unawares. Blasting in from the North, an icy wind brought coarse, thick snowflakes that stung the face and became inhaled with each breath. By mid afternoon, just as dusk began sending forth its first purple shadows, the ground was covered and the air a frigid, seething mass of grey. Standing in the parlor window of her modest townhouse, Christine ran a sleeve over the patch of fog obscuring her view and continued to survey the blizzard. She could hardly see the row of homes across the street for snow, and soon that too would be cloaked in early winter dark. She shivered, doubly grateful for her snug home, and drew her shawl closer around her. It was as well that her husband was not expected until the morrow. She should spend a sleepless night if she knew he was journeying back through this.

Turning from the window, she resumed her seat on the settee before the fire and took up the piece of mending that had occupied her for the past hour until her recent restlessness. Christine chided herself as she worked away with her needle, drawing the torn fabric back together with gentle tucks and tiny holes, so deftly that almost no sign remained of the past violence. She ought to have grown used to her husband's absences by now and not idle away the few daylight hours sitting in vain wait, like a child. Yet how many days had she spent in this very parlor, doing just that? How many fireside hours had she passed alone, humming softly to herself as though the notes alone could console her in her solitude? Had he not promised that they would share every moment of their lives together – had he not promised that she would never be alone? She knew he did not leave her out of cruelty. She knew his business in Paris was no more pleasant to him than this waiting was to her, and that only necessity and obligation of the most pressing kind could force him from her side. But it was so very hard sometimes…

A hollow knock sounded from the street, distant and muffled by the snow and the close crackling of the fire behind her, but startling enough in the otherwise still house to cause her to jerk abruptly and break her thread. No matter. She licked her fingers and moistened the broken end of thread, then rolled it between them until she'd formed a tangled knot. With great care, she rethreaded the needle.

There was a low tap at the door and Christine, not bothering to look up, called,

"Come in."

The servant entered, a young girl of scarcely 17 years, with pale hair and skin, and timid blue eyes. She watched her mistress nervously as she tried once, twice, then at last directed the thread through the eye and set the sewing down on her lap with a contented sigh. Christine looked up and smiled.

"Ah, Sophie, I was just thinking I'd like some tea."

"Of course, Madame, but…"

"Yes, what is it my dear?"

"If you please, Madame, there is a gentleman come to call."

"He cannot be here for me, Sophie. Did you tell him the master is not at home?"

"Yes, Madame, but he asked for you."

Christine frowned. Half to herself, she said,

"Who can be calling at such a time, in such weather, and for me?"

"Oh, I beg your pardon Madame, the gentleman left this." The girl approached and held out to Christine an ivory card. Christine took it and read the name curiously. After a moment, she looked up and said,

"Very well, you may show him in. But this Monsieur Delcorps is mistaken if he believes we have any former acquaintance."

"He told me, Madame," Sophie said, turning in the doorway, "that you knew him under another name. He said that you knew him only as Angel."

Christine froze. She felt the card slip from her fingers. Her lips moved in a soundless attempt to re-summon Sophie, but the girl was already gone and only Christine's own trembling breaths broke the silence. How had he found her? How here, after all this time, after they had been so careful, so quiet? In a sudden, frantic motion she cast the sewing from her lap, shoving it under her seat and out of sight. A moment later she sat stiff-backed and motionless again, her heart lurching with each pulse. At her back the fire was infernally hot.

And then he was in the doorway. He had approached as soundlessly as a shade, just as he'd done years ago in the labyrinthine passages of the Paris opera, coming and going without warning, his movement unburdened by any human signals of advance or retreat. Cloaked in black, with his broad-brimmed hat still pulled low over his head, he stood large and tall in the entrance to the small parlor. Melting snow slid off him and fell in clumps onto the carpet.

Christine desired to appear calm. She desired that he should mark in her the years that had passed since their parting; that he should know that she was no longer a naïve child to be claimed and possessed. She desired to appear cold. But with one darting glance from his eyes she felt fire spring to her cheeks and a blush flame over her snow-white skin, and she had to look away. She saw the card lying at her feet, and without thinking, bent to retrieve it. Her eyes ran over the unfamiliar name again, and then she looked up at him, trying to reconcile the strange printed words with the familiar form before her. For a moment she held the card out to him, as though by returning his flimsy possession she could as easily dismiss his own, very solid presence, but a second glance showed her that he was looking nowhere but her eyes. This time she dared to hold the gaze.

"You never told me your name."

"You never asked."

Her arm fell to her side and once more the card fluttered to the floor. Slowly, he removed his hat. The years that had passed since their parting did not appear to have aged him. He was as carefully groomed as ever, clean-shaven, even giving off a hint of cologne, but something about him – not in his face, or what she could see of it, not in his deep gaze – was different.

He broke away first, bending his eyes to his boots, which had begun to steam as they dried in the warm room. Christine started as if jerked awake.

"I'm sorry, where are my manners." She gestured to a settee by the fire.

"Please, won't you sit down? And may I take your hat and cloak?"

He seemed surprised by her sudden cordiality, but he accepted her invitation, removing his cloak and handing her the wet garments in silence. While she summoned the servant and saw to the drying of his things, he seated himself by the fire and watched her.

She was not so very altered in appearance, though she had filled out more and the startled, lost look that had once held for him so much allure was gone. Her movements were still smooth and graceful, her voice, as she instructed the servant, still soft and musical, but there was a newness – a gentle authority and a composure that the Christine he'd known in Paris had never possessed. She was still fragile, still in the glorious first bloom of youth, but she had dared to meet his eyes, and it had been he, not she, who had finally looked away.

When she resumed her seat on the divan opposite him she did so with a stillness and a grace that seemed impossible so shortly after her recent activity. A rosy blush lingered on her face.

"I was just about to have tea. Will you take some?"

Erik almost smiled. It was all so domestic, and so ludicrous, somehow, to think that he, the Ghost, was about to take tea in Christine's parlor. He wondered, with an inner smirk that he had to fight valiantly to conceal, how long the charade could continue, how long they could keep up the pretense of polite, indifferent acquaintances. She had just offered him tea. Would she next begin discussing the weather? Fighting the mirth that rose within him, he said levelly,

"Thank you."

She poured with a steady hand, accurately and intuitively adding a little milk and no sugar. He rose and met her halfway as she held out his cup, but when he reached to take it from her he realized he'd stupidly forgotten to remove his gloves.

"Excuse me." His hands shook with profound embarrassment as he pulled off the offending articles. Unfazed, she set the cup back down, then wordlessly held out her hand for his gloves, as if it were her right. He let her take them and then watched as, passing him and kneeling on the hearth behind him, she placed them on the warm tiles to dry, taking the opportunity to stoke up the fire. He turned ever so slightly to watch her fine white hands expertly grasping the irons, and an involuntary memory seized him – a memory of those very hands, holding them in his, feeling their touch on his face. He closed his eyes and let the warmth of the room and the memory envelop him like a caress.

"Erik?" He looked up with a start, and saw that she was before him, holding out his cup.

"Erik, your tea is getting cold."

He gave her what he hoped was an apologetic smile and took it from her, using the warm amber liquid as an excuse for continued silence.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, he had in fact come with a purpose. His visit had not been impromptu, any more than his politely detached manner toward her was indeliberate. Yet he could not say to her that he had planned and plotted this call for months, not reveal to her the depths to which his obsession ran. His pride – or what remained of it – would not allow such a disclosure. And despite his careful premeditation, he had not reckoned on the extent to which she would affect him; that she would leave him speechless and awkward, freezing any attempt toward triumph. He had come to prove himself to her; to show that he was – and would have been – worthy, and thus to make her feel keenly all that she had lost by denying him. He wanted to show her that he had changed, yet what would any boasting prove except that he had not? Forcing her to acknowledge his triumph and her mistake would only emphasize how incapable he was of changing, of being anything other than the infamous Opera Ghost, feeding off others' pain, consuming others' misery to keep from being consumed by his own. What good was five years of passing amongst the living if it could not transform him, if it could not make him one of them? Erik stared down into his empty teacup and felt the helplessness – and foolishness – of his position roll over him. He had only himself to blame. He had not changed. She was still too good, and he was not worthy.

Christine's voice forced him from his dark reverie.

"Do you feel warmer now?"

It was impossible for him to smile, but he nodded and told her,

"Yes. Thank you."

She waved her hand dismissively, and now he noticed the gold band encircling the fourth finger, the thing that marked her as another's. The ring took away any hope of conversation. He suddenly longed to leave, to return to the cold comfort of the snow and put as much distance between himself and this small warm parlor as the strength in his legs would allow. As he readied himself to rise, they both spoke at once.

"I have to go."

"I thought you were dead."

They stared at each other a moment in awkwardness, but also surprise.

"You do?"

"You did?"

He deferred to her question.

"Do you desire that I should not? If you want me to remain…"

"Please, don't go."

As if he could refuse her now! Almost desperately she moved toward him once more and in a single swift motion took his teacup from his hand, returning to the tray to refill it. He would have laughed at this all-too-transparent ploy to retain him, but it touched him too deeply. While she poured he asked softly,

"How did you come to think me dead?"

"Raoul said it was in all the newspapers." It was the first mention she had made of her husband, but Erik kept his composure.

"He told me a body had been found in the cellars of the Paris Opera, and we thought… Well, we assumed…"

He longed to ask her how she'd reacted to the news of his death, wanted to hear her say she had been saddened, or relieved, or overjoyed, but it was too soon, would be asking too much, and so he kept silent. He accepted the second cup of tea as quietly as he'd taken the first. Christine seemed lost for words, her earlier geniality smothered in new shyness, and he could think of nothing to say that would help her. He sipped his tea and looked anywhere but her face. When he set his cup down many long minutes later a peculiar sound – not quite a cough but something like it – made his eyes return to her. She was smiling, but there were tears in her eyes and a single pearly drop rolled down one cheek. Again she made the sound – a sob that she was trying to disguise as a laugh.

"I am glad they were wrong – the papers. I thought I was glad then – Raoul told me I was, that surely I had to be – but I was not. I am glad now."

Erik gazed at her weeping face which gazed back at him not with hate but with joy, and felt something shiver perilously within him. His carefully-constructed, carefully preserved barricade was all for naught. With one glance, all his old emotion was upon him, sudden, merciless, inescapable. He gasped for breath.

"Oh Christine."

For a while – of what duration neither of them could have said – there was nothing but the crackling of the fire and the sounds of her uneven breaths. He hardly dared to move, let alone look at her, yet he could not bear to tear his eyes from her. Could it be she did not despise him? He trembled with hope.

Time – which had hung suspended – commenced again with the entrance of Sophie, come to clear away the tea. When she had left, and Christine had finished surreptitiously drying her eyes, she folded her hands together in her lap and said,

"As you see, I live very simply now." She spoke the words as if in self-justification. He nodded noncommittally.

"I find it suits me," she continued.

Fearing that she would begin to speak of Raoul, he rose and gestured toward the bookshelves.

"May I?"

"Of course."

With a gaze made deliberately intent by his knowledge of her scrutiny, he examined the volumes and the few ornaments lining the wall, secretly searching for some sign, some token that would show she had remembered him while building her new life. He found nothing, until his eyes lighted on a hymnal, and he seized upon it eagerly.

"Is this yours?"

"Yes."

"Then you are singing still?"

"Only in church."

"Only in church," he echoed. He turned to look at her, knowing he could not hide the obvious question in his eyes.

"Yes. I gave all of that up after…" she caught his eye and looked at the floor, then began again. "After I married." She took a breath, then asked bravely,

"And you? Are you still composing?"

"No." Erik clenched his teeth. Bitterness was such a temptation, but he would not allow himself to give way now, when he had come so far, when they were speaking together like human beings. He had not "given up" his music after Christine's departure – he had simply lost it, just as he'd lost her. The notes would not come. He could no longer hear the songs that had once visited him all his waking hours, sweeping down upon him with such force that his mind hummed and his ears rang with their power and sweetness. It would be easy to tell her this, easy to say that she had taken it from him. It would be so easy to say that he had lived for the past five years in a silence of her making. Yes, it would be so easy – so wonderfully easy that he could almost imagine himself doing it right now, right in this very moment. But what would these words gain him but her tears? It was too late, far too late, for apologies on either side.

Erik swallowed and said with forced nonchalance,

"My focus has turned to design – to architecture."

"Oh." A montage of expressions played across Christine's face, one succeeding another so rapidly that Erik could detect nothing but an overriding confusion. She appeared to cast about for some better response. Taking pity, he helped her.

"Indeed, it is architecture that brings me to Stockholm. I am currently under contract to an eminent firm based in the city. Perhaps you have heard of it…" He dropped the name, but she merely smiled and shook her head apologetically.

"Have you been working here long?" she asked.

He paused a moment to weigh his words, knowing he would have to tread very carefully. Never must he reveal just how many months it had taken him to work up the courage for this visit. At last, only the fast-closing end of his contract and his imminent departure from the city had forced him into action.

"For a time," he answered.

And she echoed, still smiling, "For a time."

"Madame?"

The servant had entered again, this time without either of them noticing. Christine turned to her, only the quick, bird-like movement betraying her surprise.

"Yes, Sophie, what is it?"

"The little Master has woken from his nap. Would you like him to be brought in?" The girl looked warily at Erik, her own mind unmistakably opposed to this idea, then back at her mistress with a silent hesitation in her eyes that begged reception.

Christine gave the loyal girl a slight smile, and announced,

"No. Let him remain in the nursery. I will go to him in a minute."

Sophie's eyes closed a moment in relief. "Yes, Madame."

When she had excused herself and they were again alone, Erik looked inquiringly at his hostess.

"Do you have a child, Christine?"

A soft blush had risen to her cheeks. She met his gaze almost shyly, the slight smile still present on her lips.

"Yes. A son."

He kept his face expressionless, nodding slowly.

"A fortunate boy, to be sure."

Christine's eyes glittered, almost unnaturally bright in the fire-lit room.

"Would you like to see him?"

Erik's eyes darted back to hers, taken aback. His first instinct was to respond with a vehement negative, his second to demand why she so delighted in torturing him, dangling these little pieces of her happy life before him, reminders of all that he would never have. But her face held no spite, no traces of gloating triumph, and his own curiosity pulled at him powerfully. He could not deny that he found himself fascinated by the thought of Christine's child – both for personal and musical reasons. There was a secret longing in him to know whether this child had nothing but the Vicomte's thin blood in him, that Christine had borne a bland, milk-faced, talentless boy, merely another link in the de Chagny line, utterly unremarkable. Part of him wanted this to be so. But what if it were not? Erik stalled.

At last he asked,

"Will I not frighten him, with this?" He gestured to his face and waited uncomfortably for her response. She considered a moment, then said,

"It is possible, but I think not." She approached him. Then, cautiously, she reached out and touched his arm.

"Will you come?"

His response was to follow her from the room.

A narrow flight of stairs took them to the second story. They ascended in silence, Erik absently, unconsciously, watching the gentle sway of Chrstine's hips, the swish of her blue skirt as it brushed the treads. The beginnings of a familiar ache began deep in his gut, and his hands went cold. He clenched them in frustration. They passed a door on the landing which he guessed led to the master bedchamber (another clench of the hands), and continued down a short corridor where at last they stopped outside a second door.

"I ought to warn you," Christine said, turning to him with a fond, conspiratorial whisper, "He may fuss. He often does after waking from his nap. It will have nothing to do with you."

Erik nodded to show he understood.

"Has your son a name?"

"He is called Philippe, after Raoul's brother."

Erik nodded again, and let her open the door.

The nursery was lit only by a fire burning in the small hearth, and his mal-adjusted eyes could only just make out a dresser, a chair and a crib with a small form inside it. Christine crossed hastily to the little bed in answer to the cry of Maman! that issued from thence. Reaching inside, she lifted the boy into her arms.

"Philippe, I have brought someone to meet you."

She approached the fireplace and the light fell over both mother and child, illuminating their faces as they both turned to Erik.

The boy was fair-haired, like his father, but had his mother's wayward curls, as well as her soft brown eyes. They trained on the man who stood over the threshold as though unsure whether to stay or flee. At the sight of the visitor, the child did not flinch, did not turn away or screw up his face in fear. He opened his dark eyes very wide and gazed up at Erik's half-face with an expression of awe bordering on reverence.

Finally he turned to his mother and whispered,

"Angel?"

Erik froze, feeling a tingling under his skin, the chill a harbinger of understanding so immense that he trembled before it.

"Yes." Christine's face was full of pride but her voice was gentled by an unspoken sorrow that showed only in the too-bright sparkle of her eyes. "Yes," she told her son. "The Angel of Music is here."

Erik wanted to laugh, to cry. She had not forgotten him! All these years she had passed without him, beloved by Raoul, mother to Raoul's child, he had been there with her – her Angel of Music, whispering snatches of song into her burning ears, haunting her just as surely as she had haunted him. Not so easily was their unearthly bond severed. This little child, gazing at him with all the rapture that little Mademoiselle Daae's eyes had long ago held, was proof of its tenacity. And if it one day came to pass that their minds forgot, he knew no restful oblivion would come to swathe them, for in dreams they would haunt each other still, waking in the morning with strangely heavy hearts, with souls still twisted and gnarled, clutching, clinging, grasping for the other's, for an entwining, a union that could only exist in the might-have-been.

Erik scarcely knew how long he stood there, staring at Christine and her little son, gripping the doorframe as though he could no longer trust his legs to hold him, or trust his body not to bolt to Christine's side, fling him down at her feet and give himself completely to her.

"Will you sing for us, little one?" Christine was addressing the child coaxingly. "Will you sing something for the Angel of Music?"

But the boy shook his head, smiled shyly and hid his face in his mother's neck. No amount of pleading – exercised in first wheedling, then scolding tones – would draw a single note from him. In spite of himself, Erik smiled. He recognized this stubborn streak and thought fondly of the strange, sad, funny little girl who had been his pupil. Sometimes, in the tormented past five years, he had tried to recapture his anger, wanting to drive all the force of his hatred at that very girl – or rather, at the woman she had become – but he'd found, always, that his heart inevitably softened at the image of the little Daae who tried so earnestly and so hard to please him. All the hatred he possessed, all the bitterness, could not drive the warmth he felt for that little girl away. And now he felt no hate at all.

Christine had kissed her son and put him back in his crib when the nurse entered with the boy's supper. The woman curtsied at them both, eying Erik with the same suspicion the young maid had shown, and, incensed, he fixed her with a single steely gaze before leaving the nursery with the boy's oblivious mother. His earlier wave of emotion was receding fast. He had no place around children, that was very clear.

"I am sorry Philippe did not sing. I had so hoped he would sing for you." Christine spoke softly, standing outside the nursery door once more, worrying at her lower lip, and the inordinate distress in her voice pressed Erik into greater gentleness than he felt.

"It's alright. Really, Christine, it doesn't matter."

"No. No, I suppose it doesn't."

She glanced briefly, sadly, into his eyes, and then left him to follow her back to the first story.

They stood together in the hall in silence, each knowing that the final parting had come, each unwilling – or unable – to seal it with words. Christine could feel Erik's gaze upon her but she felt that to meet it would be to lose all that the intervening years had gained her, to once again lose herself to his intensity, his devotion, his strange poetry of being. Yet never before had such loss held such temptation. It would be so easy… just one look.

Whether by an instinctive desire toward self-preservation or an equally instinctive – if self-torturing – act by her traitorous memory, Christine found herself glancing behind her into the mirror that hung on the wall. There, she met his reflected gaze. There she once again saw his image alongside hers in the glass, but no longer distant, shadowed in mystery and childish fancies. A man stood beside her. A man of flesh and blood, possessed of feelings and dreams no more monstrous than her own. As she gazed at the glass, into the deep gray eyes where longing and torment still did battle – and oh, sent knives to her heart still! – she saw how easily it might have gone another way.

They had stood together on a knife-edge, two souls in the balance, with the very damp and dark lending themselves to this purgatory. Raoul's intervention had tipped the scales and sent circumstances spinning out of control…

He had begged her not to enslave herself for the sake of preserving his life. Either way, he had pleaded, the Phantom had to win. When she made her choice, it had to be for herself alone. And so she had played her only card, mustered all her bravery and hope… and finally walked out of the darkness a free woman, with Raoul at her side and the long nightmare breaking in the light of a new dawn.

For all her supposed freedom, they had fled Paris, she and Raoul, journeying to the comparative isolation of the North, outrunning scandal and the cruel grasp of memory, so eager, so desperate to forget. And here they still were, five years later, in hiding from all that they hadn't been able to leave behind, despite the distance. Christine had come to understand long ago that it would not end – this haunting, this treacherous longing, this fearsome desire for her Angel. He would always be there. And she no longer wished him gone…

Either way, Raoul had said, he _had_ to win. Her husband had spoken true. If she had surrendered herself to him – as indeed she had come so close to doing – he would have been the indisputable victor. And yet now – now that she saw him as he was, five years after she had callously trampled upon his heart and handed it back to him to leave without a backward glance – she saw his victory written plainly on him, a triumph greater than his crowing Don Juan could ever have dreamed. He had managed to wrest from her the love – yes, love – she'd been unable to bestow upon him then, and he stood before her now as a human being. The Phantom was dead.

She did not regret marrying Raoul. Raoul was everything a husband should be – gentle, kind, and utterly devoted to her happiness. But she saw now that she might have been happy in another way, losing herself in another's gentle music, in another's kind caresses, in another's soul-pledged devotion. If she had had the courage, she might have had… but it did not bear too much thought. She would go mad.

Christine became aware of a distant jingling of bells somewhere out in the street. Had the snow stopped?

"Anywhere you go!"

Whirling around, she met his face – his true face, not his reflection – eyes wide.

"_What?"_

Erik was smiling, rolling his eyes and shaking his head.

"There is always bound to be a sleigh making a great devilish racket, anywhere you go in this confounded city."

Christine felt the traitorous tears beginning again, but somehow she smiled back, somehow she laughed, and oh – never in all the world was a there laugh less mirthful than hers in that moment.

"Yes. There are bells everywhere."

"It has stopped snowing. I must go."

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She began to take a step in the direction of the bell, but he stopped her.

"I can see myself out, you needn't bother the servant."

"Very well," she managed.

"Christine –,"

"Yes?"

The words rolled off his tongue so easily…

_Christine, I would have done anything for you – suffered any indignity, endured any humiliation for your sake. In the end, all the anger, rage, betrayal meant nothing. All I ever wanted was your love._

She was gazing intently at him. He took a breath and realized he had not uttered a word. The time for them had long since passed.

"Christine, I wish you well."

"And I you."

He gave a nod, like a bow, and turned to go…

"Erik!" She rushed forward, catching his arm. He turned back in surprise.

"Will you shake my hand?"

Disbelief colored his eyes – they burned like a roiling ocean now – but he did not refuse her. His hand held hers, wrapping her fingers in his own gently warm ones, then… impulsively? deliberately? lifted her hand to his lips. Time stopped.

He was gone in a blink of her eyes. She did not hear the door close, but, starting to the window, she saw a vague dark form disappear into the evening. Or perhaps it was only a shadow. He had not said goodbye, and neither had she, yet she knew they would not meet again.

In a daze she made her way back to the parlor. She stood in the middle of the room and stared at the settee where he had sat, sipping tea from her china cup. She turned and looked at the shelves, at the books and ornaments he had touched, not yet daring to touch them herself, as though even this broken contact would spark something dangerous and irrevocable. She had never before felt so empty and so filled-up all at once. Was this what love felt like? Was this how Erik had felt all along? And yet he had lived, had dragged himself out of the depths of hell, had come all this way to sit and sip her tea so calmly…

Christine walked slowly to the settee and then she saw, still lying on the hearth where she'd left them, his gloves. No hesitation, no thought. Need alone compelled her. She stooped and picked them up, sliding them on. Their warmth around her fingers was like a sensatory echo. A tear slipped from her eye. From now on there would be only echoes.

Slowly, she lifted one gloved hand, letting her fingers clasp ever so delicately about her throat. She let them rest there and stood before the hearth until the fire went out and all that remained were embers.


End file.
